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We study the problem of allocating homogeneous and indivisible objects among agents with money. In particular, we investigate the relationship between egalitarian-equivalence (Pazner and Schmeidler, 1978), as a fairness concept, and…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-07-15 Hinata Kurashita , Ryosuke Sakai

We analyze a two-period principal-agent model in which the principal faces a budget constraint, and the agent's private costs of performing tasks across the two periods may be correlated. We examine the optimal design of the reward scheme…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-12-30 Eilon Solan , Avraham Tabbach , Chang Zhao

We study a robust contract design problem with deferred inspection, in which a principal allocates a scarce resource to an agent, observes the agent's realized outcome ex post at negligible cost, and conditions transfers on this information…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-01-12 Halil I. Bayrak , Martin Bichler

Fairness is desirable yet challenging to achieve within multi-agent systems, especially when agents differ in latent traits that affect their abilities. This hidden heterogeneity often leads to unequal distributions of wealth, even when…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-06-23 Jakub Tłuczek , Victor Villin , Christos Dimitrakakis

We study principal-agent problems in which a principal commits to an outcome-dependent payment scheme (a.k.a. contract) so as to induce an agent to take a costly, unobservable action. We relax the assumption that the principal perfectly…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2021-06-02 Matteo Castiglioni , Alberto Marchesi , Nicola Gatti

We consider moral hazard problems where a principal has access to rich monitoring data about an agent's action. Rather than focusing on optimal contracts (which are known to in general be complicated), we characterize the optimal rate at…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2024-07-04 Mira Frick , Ryota Iijima , Yuhta Ishii

In a framework close to the one developed by Holmstr\"om and Milgrom [44], we study the optimal contracting scheme between a Principal and several Agents. Each hired Agent is in charge of one project, and can make efforts towards managing…

Economics · Quantitative Finance 2016-05-27 Romuald Elie , Dylan Possamaï

In mechanism design it is typical to impose incentive compatibility and then derive an optimal mechanism subject to this constraint. By replacing the incentive compatibility requirement with the goal of minimizing expected ex post regret,…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2012-08-07 Paul Duetting , Felix Fischer , Pitchayut Jirapinyo , John K. Lai , Benjamin Lubin , David C. Parkes

A principal contracts with an agent who sequentially searches over projects to generate a prize. The principal initially knows only one of the agent's available projects and evaluates a contract by its worst-case performance. We…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-09-17 Théo Durandard , Udayan Vaidya , Boli Xu

We study a Bayesian contract design problem in which a principal interacts with an unknown agent. We consider the single-parameter uncertainty model introduced by Alon et al. [2021], in which the agent's type is described by a single…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-02-21 Martino Bernasconi , Matteo Castiglioni , Andrea Celli

We study optimal contract design for large populations of heterogeneous agents whose actions generate network spillovers represented by an interaction function. In a linear-quadratic framework, we solve the finite-agent problem and its…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-05-19 Guillermo Alonso Alvarez , Erhan Bayraktar , Ibrahim Ekren

We study the role of regulatory inspections in a contract design problem in which a principal interacts separately with multiple agents. Each agent's hidden action includes a dimension that determines whether they undertake an extra costly…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-11-07 Alireza Fallah , Michael I. Jordan

We study the classic principal-agent model when the signal observed by the principal is chosen by the agent. We fully characterize the optimal information structure from an agent's perspective in a general moral hazard setting with limited…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2023-07-25 Majid Mahzoon , Ali Shourideh , Ariel Zetlin-Jones

We study the problem of allocating $m$ indivisible goods among $n$ agents, where each agent's valuation is fractionally subadditive (XOS). With respect to AnyPrice Share (APS) fairness, Kulkarni et al. (2024) showed that, when agents have…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-01-15 Ziheng Chen , Bo Li , Zihan Luo , Jialin Zhang

In online combinatorial allocation, agents arrive sequentially and items are allocated in an online manner. The algorithm designer only knows the distribution of each agent's valuation, while the actual realization of the valuation is…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Enze Sun , Zhihao Gavin Tang , Yifan Wang

We introduce reinforcement learning for heterogeneous teams in which rewards for an agent are additively factored into local costs, stimuli unique to each agent, and global rewards, those shared by all agents in the domain. Motivating…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-19 Roi Ceren , Prashant Doshi , Keyang He

We study two-player general sum repeated finite games where the rewards of each player are generated from an unknown distribution. Our aim is to find the egalitarian bargaining solution (EBS) for the repeated game, which can lead to much…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-05 Aristide Tossou , Christos Dimitrakakis , Jaroslaw Rzepecki , Katja Hofmann

We study fairness through the lens of cooperative multi-agent learning. Our work is motivated by empirical evidence that naive maximization of team reward yields unfair outcomes for individual team members. To address fairness in…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-01-20 Niko A. Grupen , Bart Selman , Daniel D. Lee

A group of agents each exert effort to produce a joint output, with the complementarities between their efforts represented by a (weighted) network. Under equity compensation, a principal motivates the agents to work by giving them shares…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2023-08-29 Krishna Dasaratha , Benjamin Golub , Anant Shah

We study fair multi-agent multi-armed bandit learning under collision-only coordination. Agents cannot communicate explicitly during learning and observe only their own rewards and whether collisions occur when several agents access the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Amir Leshem